[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

WUWT has a followup article:

Climate Craziness of the week: a basic science question for NYT reporter Justin Gillis

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Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anthony Watts

Readers please note the story I ran earlier: NOAA: “the atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity is rather stable”

This story talks about the ability of hydroxyl radicals in the free atmosphere to break down pollutants, and how there seems to be a stability in the levels globally, something understood for the first time. All good news.

Now read what this New York Times reporter, Assistant Business Editor Justin Gillis, bemoans in his story here:

A Steady Dose of Atmospheric Detergent

He writes:

Unfortunately, the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is not one of those broken down by the hydroxyl radical.

Zounds!

Mr. Gillis, let’s say such a thing magically did occur naturally, or someone creates a synthetic catalyst that performs the job and releases enough of it into the atmosphere in some geoengineering scheme to start dissipating CO2 in the atmosphere.

1. What would happen if we rid the Earth of CO2 ?
2. Or more technically, what would happen if this process scavenged CO2 down to 150 parts per million (or lower) globally?

If you can answer these questions, you might then understand why I am giving your statement the high praise of this regular feature.

This WUWT post on CO2 has a clue for you. I offer it as a path to enlightenment.

While you are at it, you might also like to address this story you did on sea level rise:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The WUWT post on CO2:

B>The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide

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I recast Willis’ first graph as a bar chart to make the concept easier to understand to the layman:

Lo and behold, the first 20 ppm accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. One thing to bear in mind is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 got down to 180 ppm during the glacial periods of the ice age the Earth is currently in (the Holocene is an interglacial in the ice age that started three million years ago).

Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. If plants were doing climate science instead of us humans, they would have a different opinion about what is a dangerous carbon dioxide level.